Canned ham
by planet p
Summary: AU! On a dull day, Volante sits in front of the lounge room window and thinks about another place. OC-centric!


**Canned ham** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

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The chocolate tastes of sweet plastic: on the ceiling of her mouth, it feels plastic. Either it's too old, or it's of a low quality. Underneath, it has absorbed the taste of the plastic packaging it came in, the taste of the refrigerator in which it sat. Why did she eat it, she wonders now. Was it in a moment of whimsy, of imagined sentimentality, reminisce?

The distasteful taste lingers in her mouth; she has the urge to brush her teeth, to gargle, or wash her mouth out with water. She sits down in a chair by the window: the chair is comfortable, its cushions are comfortable: soft, but not too soft. She allows herself to sink into the feeling of comfort, to let it take sway within her: she relaxes for a moment, or two.

She does not look outside the window, the weather is dull and she is not in the mood for dull; she doesn't want to know about dull. She imagines that she is not sitting in this room, but somewhere else. A better place. What place would that be? she asks herself. What would its qualities be? To make it 'better'.

It would be on the warm side of the temperature scale, she decides. It would be sunny; there would be no clouds: just a large, blue sky. There would be a soft breeze; she would feel it on her face, a soft, wandering caress-

Somewhere, a door bangs against a wall. It is in the apartment; it is her door. She stands; she has returned from her travels, regretfully. She does not let upset or annoyance take hold, but crosses the room efficiently, from the window to the door: economically; neither hurried nor at a dawdle. She reaches the door in a few, long strides (not too long, though; one shouldn't need to take long strides inside a house): she is at the door, now; standing in the doorway, with the smallest movement (not even a full step).

The door-banger stands in the hallway: she can see them clearly from her vantage, standing in the doorway. They are holding bags, plastic shopping bags. Her mother. Her mother is holding shopping; she'd been out shopping, and now she was back. She seems to remember the mention of a shopping trip. Yes, that's right. There had been mention of an upcoming trip to the shops. Groceries, she thinks. Anything else?

The door is left open. It reminds her of someone's mouth: _Keep it open_, says the dentist, so it looks like a gaping cave, were they only able to look upon it as the dentist did. She strides swiftly to shut it, slipping side-on as she passes her mother in the hallway; wonders if they'd have bad breath, if the dentist would have to fight not to flinch or shudder, or the small mutter that welled up in his/her throat, _Pew!_

She's never needed to see the dentist. She has, nevertheless. Her teeth are perfect: small, white, perfectly arranged. A cold breeze comes in from the hallway in which their apartment appears as a numbered door (not as a home); the door handle is cold as she takes it to close the door. The sound is small, nothing like her mother's earlier bang - BANG! I'm home; here I am - the lock clicks shut almost indiscernibly: small, too, like the shutting of the door. _Pew!_ No, _Phew!_

When she turns (remembering, suddenly, the steps which she'd taken to reach the door: large, sudden steps; quick steps: the wrong sort of steps for a home), her mother has gone from the hallway. She has gone into the kitchen.

She walks with slow, soft steps: she is making up for her earlier steps, the entirely wrong sort of steps. Her mother has left the shopping in its shopping bags on the kitchen floor, by her shoes, and is making coffee. As her mother makes coffee, drifting away from the bags one moment, and back again another, she trains her eyes on the shopping bags; gradually, the shopping abandons its designation as an 'it', as though it were an animal shedding an old skin, and becomes many. Many, odd-shaped things. Shopping things. She makes out items which she knows the names of: milk, juice, biscuits, crackers, cans of peas, beans, processed ham.

She wonders who all these things are for. She is a vegetarian: she doesn't eat canned processed ham.

"Dad's visiting and I'm making dinner," her mother says, as though she'd plucked her daughter's quiet, errant thoughts from the air in front of her.

Had she? she wonders. She doesn't move. She knows why her mother says 'dad': not _your_ dad or _my_ dad, just dad: because he is both. He is her father, and her mother's father, too. When her mother had been a baby, the man and his wife had adopted her, and he had become her dad. He was her dad, but he wasn't: but he was.

She doesn't say a thing, but her legs and feet move, carrying her forward, into a seat at the kitchen table. She sits.

She waits.

Her dad is coming for dinner.


End file.
